Contacts & Calendars
Two familiar OS X apps get new names in
Mountain Lion: Address Book becomes Contacts, and iCal is transformed into
Calendars. But the changes in both apps are more than name-deep.
Contacts
Contacts marks the return of the beloved
three-column view found in Snow Leopard’s Address Book. In Lion, Address Book
offered a two column view: It either showed groups on the left page and a list
of contacts within that group on the right, or if clicked the bookmark at the
top of the page – a group’s contact list on the left and a selected contact on
the right.
Three
columns: Contacts restores the three-column view: groups on the left, contact
lists in the center, and individual contacts on the right.
Mountain Lion’s Contacts puts the list of
groups on the left, a list of contacts in the middle, and a specific contact’s
card on the right the same arrangement Snow Leopard used. You can switch
between three-, two-, and one-column views by clicking the appropriate buttons
at the bottom of the contacts window or by choosing Groups, List And Card, or
Card Only, respectively, from the View menu.
Mountain Lion’s Contacts app addresses
another issue that has confounded users for years: what happens when you have
the same contact on more than one service iCloud, Yahoo, and Google, say?
Often, that one person would appear as three separate entries. Contacts fixes
that with a unified view that incorporates information from multiple services
for a single contact. So if you’ve stored Sally Jone’s street address in
iCloud, her phone number on Yahoo, and her email address in your Google
contacts, Contacts should create a single entry that combines all of those bits
of information.
If a person has multiple records, but
Contacts doesn’t recognize them as belonging to the same individual, you can
combine them. Select one press 
and select the other, and then choose Merge And Link Selected Cards
from the Card menu. The two cards will become one. When you examine this newly
unified card, you’ll see a Linked Card entry that indicates the accounts and
names from which the information originated – Yahoo and iCloud, for instance,
under the names Chris Breen and Christopher Breen.
Finally,
Contacts expands the Share button’s talents. Under Lion, if you selected a
contact and then clicked the Share button at the bottom of the Window, Mail
would open and create an unaddressed email message with the contact attached as
a vCard file. Click the Share button in Contacts and, in addition to Email
choices: Message Card and AirDrop Card. 
Sharing:
As with other Mountain Lion apps, sharing options are built into Contacts: From
a given record, click the Share button to send it via Mail, Messages, or
AirDrop.
When you choose Message Card, a new message
window appears with the card embedded as a vCard file. To send it, just address
the message and click the Send button. AirDrop Card works similarly. When you
select it, an AirDrop window appears, along with the embedded vCard. Anyone on
your local network who has the AirDrop window open can receive the card. All
you have to do select a recipient and press the Send button.
Calendar
Like Contacts, Calendar offers a welcome
combination of a retired-but-returned feature and new capabilities.
For one thing, the Calendars pane
reappears. In Lion’s iCal, to choose among your many calendars, you had to
click a Calendars button and select your calendar from the resulting drop-down
list. In Mountain Lion, that list has returned to the left pane, where it was
located in Snow Leopard. Click the Calendars button in the top left portion of
the screen to show or hide this pane.
On the new side of the ledger, Calendar
introduces search suggestions. Such as with Spotlight, when you type a term
into Calendar’s Search field, matching (or nearly matching) events appear in a
list. Enter Dentist, for example, and you may find Dentist
Appointment or simply Dentist. Choose one of those suggestions, and matching
events appear in a list on the right. You can focus searches on event titles,
location, invites, or words in event notes.
In its Edit and Inspector windows,
Calendars includes a mini-calendar display. Click a date within one of those
windows, and the mini-calendar appears. When you choose a different date on the
calendar, your event shifts to that date. You can also change end times for
events more easily: Click the ending time for an event, and a menu appears that
lets you shift that time back half an hour (from 3:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m., for
example) or forward, in half-hour increments, up to 3 hours after the beginning
of the event.
Given how fiddly the Information and Edit
windows can be, any opportunity to simply click in lieu of having to click and
type is welcome.
Finally,
in addition to throwing up an alert when an event alarm goes off, Calendar
posts alerts in Mountain Lion’s Notification Center. If you’ve chosen to show
events in Notification Center (you can turn this option off in the
Notifications presences pane), you can’t remove calendar events by clicking an
X next to an application heading, as you can with other applications. Calendar
events remain in Notification Center until they expire. 
Calendar
search: Enter a search term in Calendar, and the application finds it in event
titles, locations, invitees, and even notes.
As is the case with other items that
involve notifications, you can configure how event alerts behave in the
Notifications system preference. By default, calendar events appear as alerts
that you must acknowledge. If you prefer a banner that flashes and then
disappears, choose that option in the Notifications preference pane.
Safari
Safari has been around forever, and you
might not think Apple could do much to improve it in Mountain Lion. But the
company has found some clever – and welcome – ways to update the app.
Do
not track: Previous editions of Safari supported the Do Not Track standard;
Safari 6.0 makes it more accessible.
Tabs and search
One way Apple accomplished that positive
result was by taking some inspiration from other browsers. The most obvious
example is the new unified address and search bar. Like Google Chrome, Safari
6.0 has a single text box up top (instead of supplying one box for Web
addresses and another for searching).
Type a URL in the new box, and the browser
goes to that site. Type some text in it, and Safri performs a search for that
term. As you type, the browser shows you a drop-down list of possible hits.
First comes a section that it calls Top Hits – the things it guesses are most
likely what you’re looking for, based on your previous patterns. After that,
Safari lists some possible search term you might want to use on Google, the
default search engine. (You can, of course, change that default in the
application’s preferences). Below that are matching hits in your browsing
history and bookmarks.
The other way Apple has updated Safari is
something it has done throughout Mountain Lion: typing the desktop OS and its
apps more tightly than ever to iOS and iCloud.
In this regard, the new Safari offers
something called iCloud Tabs. Clicking the iCloud Tabs button (the one with the
cloud on it up in the toolbar) produces a live list of the browser tabs that
are open on all of the other OS X and iOS machines linked to your Apple ID and
iCloud account.
What that potentially means is that you can
start reading something on your iPhone, and then switch to your Mac later and
pick up where you left off. We say potentially because this feature won’t be
fully functional until the release of iOS 6 this fall. For now, it works well
for syncing Safri tabs between Macs.
There’s also a touch-friendly new Tab View.
If you have a touchpad, you can reveal all of the tabs you have open with a
pinch gesture; then you can switch between them using a two-finger swipe left
or right. These new gestures feel familiar gestures in iOS. Visually, tabs
emulate those in iOS. Visually, tabs emulate those in iOS: They stretch and
shrink as necessary to fill the span of your browser window.
